Winston-Salem citizens who support the separation of church and state plan to stage a protest at yet another Good News Club Spectacular. The first protest is the subject of a documentary by Scott Burdick titled “Sophia Investigates The Good News Club.” Since it was uploaded last month, the film has been viewed over 20,000 times on Youtube.
The fresh protest at the Winston-Salem event will also be filmed by Burdick. The controversy has received coverage in the Winston-Salem Journal, , MyFox8, and others.
I applaud efforts by Winston-Salem community members to speak up for the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state. The Good News Club may present itself as a benign effort to share its religious views with small children. But its real purpose in being in the public schools is to convince small children —many of whose families do not share the group’s fundamentalist Christian beliefs—that the school endorses a particular variety of religion. Deceiving small kids in public schools into thinking that there is a state-sponsored religion is not part of the free exercise of religion. Furthermore, it compromises the educational mission of schools, and degrades support for public education as a whole.